My reflection on a blooming woman's riveting interpretation of the paths followed through the coarse of American slavery.
Am I more or less free than the women of my ancestry who came before? The mothers, aunties, sisters, and cousins who sculpted my feet to break the cycle of bloodied footprints uncleansed by wicked waters. Waters so unforgiving for dark girls like me, daughters of the sun, my hair howling to the moon. Tell me, Yaa Gyasi, am I more or less free than the women who came before. As my eyes settled beneath the ink of Homegoing, my mind slipped away into the world of the women layered within each chapter. They were women of the past, women of a distant future, and of an air I’ll never breathe. Each woman’s soul called to a Home, some intangible gut-clenching feeling innate to her own struggle, and yet I felt the tether pulling at me, too. Molding the silk of each word to her command, these women wrote their own histories, coming to life and begging me to follow them into the blur between realistic fiction and reality. The biggest disservice I could have done to myself was let tangibility be the marker of truth. Even with the understanding that the connection I had formed with these women had ultimately been shaped by the imagination of this other very real yet distant woman, Yaa Gyasi, it felt as though still, somehow we were all sisters, these women: my family.
My own blood descends from the Xhosa tribe and Thembu people on my mother’s side and from some unknown west African country on my father’s. I’ve always found my feet wallowing a thin line between Africa and slavery, on the coast of a black identity, a black woman’s identity. Anywhere the current may choose to carry me, pieces of my skin still float off to another distant shore. I’d like to think that home doesn’t have to be something you can touch or even feel, but if you can just imagine that somewhere out in the vast universe, there may be that thing which holds all of you without explanation, then that might be enough. But the need for accessibility to the knowledge my ancestor’s hold, keeps me captive as a buoy in the middle of my forever-extending ocean. I’ve had old men, with fair white skin telling me about the stories of my people for as long as I can remember and if you were to ask me to tell you what I know about home, I’d tell you that the home I’ve been made to believe is my own, is only a patch of land stolen from another’s soul and placed inside my own for temporary keeping. Yaw Agyekum m.’s words sang to my spirit in a deeper tone when he said “We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?” I know that the lessons I’ve been taught in school about Blackness and womanhood are not the dreams my ancestors whisper to me in my sleep, I know that the traditions my mother carries and the pride she holds is only a half-fulfilled prophecy passed down from her ancestors. So, how do I get to voices spoken in a foreign tongue. Are ancient histories buried beneath the sands of my ocean or do they live in the coils of my hair? When I think about the women of the past and think about the terror they faced in order to create a light, brighter and more visible beyond my deepening hue, I wonder are they disappointed in what I’ve become. A young woman daring to claim this skin, not knowing or understanding where it derives from. A black body living in liberation, unaware of where freedom once lied and what it took to capture her.
The stories of women like Akua, whose ancestors visited in fire-filled dreams to teach their daughter the reason for her suffering and the truth behind her fears, are the stories that stained my tongue and lips. They are the stories of those who feel as though they have been forgotten by good and left to rot in merciless terror, the stories of women kept awake at night by the song of sorrow sung by her ancestors, they are the stories of people who don’t know their history, held captive by ignorance. They feel like my own stories, though I know they don’t belong to me so then I’m forced to ask what does? What can I claim, what might I say is my own, my own history, my own people, my own liberty, my own struggle? How can I claim any story this world tells me when I do not know my own? When I don’t know the stories of my people, when I don’t know the stories of the women who came before me though their stories are what creates every essence of my being, how do I even know who I am?
These are all questions I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to answer but I think the power in Homegoing is the way in which these stories jolt you out of comfortability and force you to question certain ideas you once identified as your truths. I once thought that being alive at this very moment in time, in this body, with this skin and hair, that as a black woman of my lineage I am the most free my women have ever been. But, reading Homegoing forced me to question what defines freedom. It forced me to question whether I am living in my own self-defined liberation or in the freedom someone else has created for me, someone who has the power to tell me stories of what is and what is not liberation. I have yet to fully secure myself from this dependency on a skewed image of history to validate my existence as a liberated being but because of this novel I am diving deeper beneath the surface to find the voices of women of my ancestry, to ask them to tell me the stories this world cannot. Then maybe, I might be able to be truly free.
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